Review – Finn: A Novel

I just finished reading Jon Clinch’s debut novel, Finn, the re-telling of Huckleberry Finn’s father’s story. The story parallels the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and fills in the details surrounding his father (Finn) and his dark history. It was a fabulous book.

For a boy (now young man) who grew up loving the stories of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, this novel drew me in immediately. Set as a work of parallel fiction, Finn is written based upon details found within Huckleberry Finn, specifically relating to the washed up house Huck and Jim find during their river travels. This mysterious house, with all it’s random artifacts (whiskey bottles, masks, and even a dead body), gives Clinch all sorts of objects to go back and weave into his explanation for Finn’s desolate past.

Twain’s books hold a special place in my heart, as a kid who loved to adventure like Huck and Tom around the neighborhood. And now, as I’ve grown up a bit, this book feels like a welcome reminder of the much darker, twisted, and real parts of life that the stories of young boys often omit or fail to realize. Finn’s alcoholism, violence, racism, and broken relationships come to the surface, forming a character whose tragic existence is so much more complete because of their exposure. Reading Twain, I found myself wondering about where Huck came from, as many of the parents of St. Petersburg children wondered. Noting their coveting of Huck’s lifestyle, Twain describes him as "cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town…all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him." But knowing his past, his father’s origins, a deep feeling of pity and care for this poor orphan unfortunately arises.

The book weaves two story lines together, as it move through the early life of Finn, while also telling of his struggles after discovering Huck’s newly acquired fortune (end of Tom Sawyer, weaving into Huckleberry Finn). By using this device, along with some expectation of the reader’s familiarity with Twain’s stories, you know the end before it comes and yet are intrigued to understand the connections that lead you there nonetheless. As Clinch says in the author’s note, "this is Finn’s book", and while the story carries into the life of his son, it stands quiet separately as it’s own life in fiction.

I don’t often feel so strongly about a book, whether I like it or not, but Finn has definetly captured something in me. It could be it’s ties to my childhood-reader’s life and it’s coming into maturity with the stark realities of the world I thought I knew. I do appreciate a work that can weave new life into a closed book, a story that seemed to have a proper, defined end. If you’ve read Huck and Tom’s stories, pick this up, it’s well worth it. If you haven’t, please go back and read Twain’s masterpieces, and then, read Finn.

Emergent Manifesto – Growing Pains (Ch. 2)

As I mentioned a couple days ago, I’ve begun going through "An Emergent Manifesto of Hope", a compilation of writings by leaders in the emerging church. This book has been a refreshing and thought-provoking read thus far. I’m planning to discuss it with a couple of INN small group leaders that I meet with regularly, hopefully finding a good conversation with them.

While I can’t reflect on each chapter, because there are so many good ideas and I’m moving through it rather quickly, I’ll try to respond at least a couple times to chapters that stick out. The first of such responses is to Mark Scandrette’s chapter "Growing Pains – The Messy and Fertile Process of Becoming". I really appreciated Scandrette’s approach to the process of faith, rather than the immediate conversion to faith, a story that resounds deeply within me.

An Emergent Manifesto of Hope

Today I began "An Emergent Manifesto of Hope", the first book released by the "emersion" partnership between Emergent Village and their new publishing partner, Baker Books. I heard about this book as it was being put together last summer and I have been excited to get my hands on it and catch up with many of the contributors to this conversation.

My hope is that as I read, I can have a chance to reflect on many (probably not all, but who knows) of the chapters, giving some of my own thoughts to these new ideas and views on faith, ministry, and the conversations this group of people are having. I should say, we’re having. I feel like I’ve become a part of this conversation with my small contributions to the Presbymergent group, an outgrowth of some of the ideas in this book. Presbymergent is a community of Presbyterian members and pastors who are engaging the emerging church conversation within their PC(USA) churches and trying to embrace the tension of living as what some have described as "loyal radicals" within this mainline denomination.

So, I’ll start with my thoughts on Tony Jones’ introduction, a good primer to what I’m hoping will be a very interesting book and challenging conversation. Jones traces the history of his involvement with Emergent, the "friendship" of people from varying church backgrounds and denominations who have steered the conversation since the late-90s. Tony talks about this idea of friendship being central to this group, a binding piece that holds together many different perspectives and ideas with faithful relationships. He describes the first meeting of young pastors in Arlington, TX back in 1998:

The room positively crackled. I think that’s because we had the feeling, even back then, that we were on to something. Even as we struggled to determine what that ’something’ was, we talked about an element of the connection that was seemingly even more important, and surely more elusive, and that was and is friendship.

As I have wrestled with this first year of ministry, I have been struck by the need for community and friendship with people who are willing to discuss and work through the concepts and experiences I’m having with me. I see the desire to have these friendships of faith, where we can discuss the way we see God working in our lives, talk about the challenges we face as we see him interacting with the people we are serving, and work towards a better understanding of how we do our ministry and live our lives in light of what we learn. I’ve found this in my small group of post-college, post-INN guys that I meet with every week. I have found something like this with my former roommates, when we have a book discussion. I’ve experienced a deeper "friendship" in faith with Stacy, as she and I work out our questions about faith and life and marriage together. And I’ve also experienced this "friendship" within our unique staff at the INN, where we are always talking about the questions God is confronting us with and the challenges we face in our work.

It’s exciting to know that there is a wider circle of friends who are willing to step out and try new things, work through new challenges, and engage fresh perspectives on where God is leading his people. If it’s not clear, I’m excited about this book and about what Emergent is doing to help people learn and work out their faith in their own settings. I’ll look forward to sharing more thoughts as I read through.

a long way gone – Review

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah is the story of a child from Sierra Leone who is displaced from his family by war and who finds himself caught up in the fighting as a 15 year old. Ishmael’s memoir focuses on his life of violence and his rehabilitation from the psychological damage and drug dependencies pushed upon him as he falls into fighting for the Sierra Leone army against the RUF rebels in the mid-1990s. You may have seen this book selling at the local Starbucks recently, as they are doing a big push to sell the book and help promote Beah’s story. I would tell you this is not a Mitch Albom book and as trendy as it might seem to buy a book at Starbucks, I wholeheartedly recommend it because of the incredible story it includes and because of the immense implications it should have on our lives.

It is wild to think about holding an AK-47 as a 15 year old boy. It’s even crazier to imagine killing without remorse, without thinking, in response to a war that has displaced your family, most likely killed all the people you know and love, and has entirely ruined your world. But this is where Ishmael found himself. This book is full of heart-wrenching images of killing and pain, all things that no person should ever have to witness, let alone be taught to do. It is painful to hear Ishmael’s account, as he seems to lose all sense of identity and memory within the war and the killing. The deep emotional damage this creates is incredible.

Yet, this book is full of hope. I don’t want to ruin the story for anyone, but it is a story of redemption and he is eventually liberated from the army by UNICEF. It is hopeful as we see him fight through nightmares and drug withdrawals (substances which included marijuana, cocaine, and "brown-brown", a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder). To see him respond to the care of the UNICEF workers and people who actually cared about bringing him back to life is very emotional, as I felt invested in bringing him around and helping him see that what he did was not his fault.

I definetly recommend reading this book. Borrow my copy, please. Or, buy it from Starbucks, where they will donate $2 to UNICEF with your purchase (Make sure you buy Fair Trade coffee while you’re there though).

The issue of children soldiers around the world and specifically in Africa is horrifying. A book like this or a movie like Blood Diamond, which is also about Sierra Leone and I also recommend, help me see the real people who are impacted by these issue and help us all see the pain it causes. It is never right for a child to have to carry a gun and kill. Why should children fight wars that they have not started? Should they have to respond in violence to the violence inflicted upon them? It’s not really even a question about whether these wars are right, that’s beside the point in a lot of ways. It’s that this generation of children is missing their childhood and growing up only knowing war and death and suffering. Who will they be when/if they grow up? How will they help solve the problems if the adults who put guns in their hands take away their voice and take their hope away?

I feel like I kind of go all over the place with different causes, at least here on this blog. Whether it’s the climate with An Inconvenient Truth, or faith and politics, or now children soldiers, I feel like I get passionate about something for awhile and then drop it. Or I get cynical about it, knowing that it’s such a big issue and so few people actually give a rip. I would just say this in closing then: we need to find a way to do something. It can be giving money to UNICEF. It can be calling our senator about acting in environmentally conscious ways or doing something about the Darfur conflict. Whatever we do, it should be our response as people who care about our world, who want to see people loving each other, who want to see people standing up for those who struggle, and because we know God calls us to act on behalf of our world and on behalf of the "least of these." So, I don’t know what you’re going to do. I’m not sure what I’ll do. But let us all be aware and let us not turn our heads away.

Preaching Re-Imagined – Book Review

I just finished Doug Pagitt’s Preaching Reimagined – The Role of the Sermon in Communities of Faith, a book we’ve been assigned to read for Senior Staff at the INN which evaluates the current standard for preaching in most churches. Overall it was a pretty easy read with a few challenging ideas.

Pagitt claims that the role of preaching has been taken over by what he calls "speaching" in many church settings. This act of "speaching" involves well-prepared sermons, created behind closed doors, with little or no input from the church community, by the resident theological expert (aka: the pastor). Because the sermon has devolved into a lecture-based presentation form, our communities are held back from engaging in dialoguing the sermon and engaging the ideas for themselves by being able to ask questions, use their own knowledge, and contribute to the teaching and learning going on at church. Instead of "pastor as loudspeaker", Pagitt argues that a dialogue can take place in our worship settings that helps us engage the topic as a group and discover the implications of the Word in life.

What does this look like? Basically, the argument is that by allowing members of the congregation to have a voice in the service, we allow a deeper learning to take place. What if it were possible to approach a topic by hearing a prepared piece by our pastor and then have time set aside to ask questions, voice disagreements, and respond vocally to what we’ve just heard? Instead of sitting quietly and listening each week, the idea here is to jump on the ideas while they are fresh in our minds and respond to their implications and meanings for our community.

Stacy and I talk about one of the education techniques she employs a lot in her classroom: turn and talk. Students read something as a class or get a question and then turn to their neighbor and talk about what they think about it. This allows them to hear each other’s opinions, actively engage what they are learning, and put words to their thoughts. If teachers are using this to help kids learn more effectively, why aren’t we using it in church, where we claim the lessons to be more eternal significance than reading, writing, and arithmetic?

A diversity of opinions can be daunting to engage in a church setting, but I think there is room to open up further dialogue than a single loudspeaker "speacher" up front. I think this can play out with a coordinated small group program, if it doesn’t work in the normal Sunday service. It can work in community sermon preparation, an idea Pagitt engages in each week as he meets with members of the church to talk about ideas for the sermon in the days leading up to it’s "presentation" (oh, I think I hate to use that word now).

I think a good example I’ve seen in my life of the progressional dialogue approach is at the Sound Community. Each week, Ryan and members of the church meet to do exegesis on the chosen passage for the week. Coming with multiple translations of the Bible, concordances, dictionaries, etc., members of the community talk about what the passage is saying to them, how it resounds, what it might mean, all in hopes of engaging the topic in the mind of the community early in the week, in preparation for Sunday. I’ve visited one such exegesis and I really enjoyed the feeling that I was a part of the creation of Sunday’s message. It wasn’t just Ryan preparing a sermon in an office somewhere. It was people actively engaging a topic together as the Holy Spirit led them. It was exciting.

The question posed now is how we make this a part of the INN community.
How do we allow students to dialogue the topics we bring up on Tuesday
nights? Do we allow for a discussion time following the "talk"? Do we
offer more times throughout the week for students to engage in
conversations about what we’re covering, topically? I’m open to flexibility on form if it means we engage what God is teaching the community in a more effective way.

I’ll pose a couple questions: What would it look like for your church service to not only listen to a sermon, but engage in a dialogue on the teachings together each week? Would it work? What forms of the service might need to be changed to allow this to work?

Book Review – How (Not) to Speak of God

I’ve spent a fair amount of time reading this break, catching a chance to finish up on a few that I’d started and prepare for a book discussion with some good friends in a week or so. One book that I’ve been slowly go through with a couple of small group leaders this last quarter is How (Not) to Speak of God. I originally heard about the book from the Pomomusings blog this last summer.

The book approaches the broader theological issues that the "emerging church" confronts as churches like Ikon, where author Peter Rollins attends, work out what it means to be church in the postmodern, post-Christian world. While it’s hard to pin down a theological stance on this movement (because it’s filled with people from every denomination and non-denomination) I feel like Rollins does a great job of distilling some of his ideas about church and faith into some clear philosophical and theological points. Not arguments, not doctrinal statements, just points of conversation.

Pi and Rediscovering Fiction

The last couple of weeks have been a revelation in reading for me. It may sound small, but it’s been amazing I rediscovered a little thing called FICTION! It’s incredible!!

Now that may sound odd, but I really haven’t read a fiction book in a long time. I read a few short stories and a CS Lewis book last summer, but even in those I was looking for some "deeper meaning" and not just able to just be wrapped up in a completely other story than my own. Life of Pi allowed me to do this.

I will really try not to spoil the ending with this post, but you might not want to keep reading if you haven’t read this book. If you haven’t, why are you reading my blog? Go read that book.

A Primer on Postmodernism

Well, I feel like I’ve got postmodernism down now. That wasn’t too tough. Next philosophical movement, please.

I finally finished Stanley Grenz’s Primer on Postmodernism and while I’m no where near understanding even 1/2 of what he said, or what the philosophers and writers he covers in this book meant, I feel like I have a little better grasp on some of the implications of the movement. And, I’m excited. I’m excited to think that there may be people who believe that cut-and-dry, rational perceptions of our world may not actually be the complete picture. I’m excited for some of the implications this book/movement has on things like community. And while it’s just a start and the book is about ten years old, I’m excited about how Grenz talks about the Gospel within the context of postmodernism. I know that a lot of people in the Church have taken his words and those others like him to heart and have begun developing ways to reach the emerging postmodern community with the Gospel. So, I’ll try to touch on some of the things this book made me think about, but I do recommend if you’re interested in this stuff, to check the book out.

N.T. Wright’s “The Last Word”

Yesterday I finished a fascinating book, The Last Word by N.T. Wright, which covers the immense topic of Biblical authority. While I hardly know where to begin, I thought it might be worthwhile to approach some of what the book says and hopefully convince anyone who is interested to check it out.

The Secret Message of Jesus, Study Guide

Brian McLaren’s new book, The Secret Message of Jesus, came out at the beginning of the month. If you’re currently reading it, as I am, or are interested in checking it out, you should check out McLaren’s website and grab the Secret Message study guide. While I’m not much of a guided study kind of guy, I’m going to try and use this to sort of wrangle some of my wide-ranging ideas as I read the rest of the book.

I’ve read most of McLaren’s recent work (The New Kind of Christian trilogy and A Generous Orthodoxy), so a lot of his ideas are very familiar to me and can be easy to gloss over or now think much about. The study guide might be of some use.